Stuff management

David Gurteen asks what KM is really all about

I know what many of you may be thinking but that’s not the theme of this article.

A few years back, I was discussing knowledge management (KM) with a knowledge manager I knew. I explained how difficult it was, at a practical level, to separate knowledge from information. In any form of document, information and explicit knowledge are intertwined and it makes no useful sense to try to distinguish the two.

She laughed, and said that they were aware of that in her organisation and they made no effort to make the distinction. In fact, they called the rich mix of information and knowledge simply ‘stuff’ and the management of it, they called ‘stuff management’!

We both laughed at the play on words.

It takes two
In my workshops, I often tell people that there are two broadly accepted views of knowledge.

The first is that knowledge can be tacit (that is the knowledge in your head) or it can be explicit (that is the knowledge written down on paper or stored in an IT system).

Or second, it only exists inside your head. Everything else is information. This includes artefacts, videos, drawings and the flow of speech.

And I ask which of the two views people hold. It is interesting that the split is usually about 60:40 either way.

So there are two dominant views on the nature of knowledge that are being used on an everyday basis. This can be confusing.

But it gets worse. In everyday language most of us make little distinction between information and knowledge and we use the words interchangeably.

Often we use the word knowledge in place of information to avoid repeating the same word in a sentence or to add gravitas to what we are saying.

I was reading a KM book recently, where the authors went to some length to spell out the difference between information and knowledge in the opening chapter of the book and then in the remaining chapters they reverted to freely mixing the two words without any thought to their meaning.

It’s no wonder there is so much confusion around KM.

For a long time, I was in the tacit/explicit camp when it comes to the nature of knowledge. I learnt to live with the two forms and the loose usage of the terminology as it clearly was not going to change in a hurry.

But increasingly with KM, I use the definition that anything written down is information and everything in my head is knowledge.

It’s a simple clean separation. And it makes the distinction between information management and knowledge management crystal clear.

As Steve Dale tweeted recently “Information management is about organising stuff. knowledge management isn’t!”

So if KM isn’t about organising stuff then what is it about?

With information, we manage the capture, the structuring, the aggregation, the storage and the flow. Our IT systems are good at that.

But with KM, we manage the understanding and the making sense of information and the insights gleaned from information which in turn influences our decision making and our ability to innovate. This only takes place in the human mind.

We have no real control of how we store knowledge in our mind but we do have control over what we read, what we write, what we watch, who we listen to and who we talk to. And, of course, the learning processes and practices that we adopt.

We can manage the flow of information into and out of our heads. And we can manage to some degree the mental processes by which we make decisions and take action.

It’s interesting to note that if you work with this definition, then most KM as practiced today is really information management. KM on the other hand is highly personal and can only ever be really achieved at the level of the individual.

So to conclude, to my mind, knowledge is the stuff in our heads and we can manage it. It’s called KM or stuff management if you prefer.

David Gurteen is the founder of Gurteen Knowledge and a member of the Inside Knowledge editorial board. He can be contacted via his website at www.gurteen.com